A Step Too Bold?

Is there life on Mars? Or Rosetta, Europa, or even Pluto?  A dilettante hand-waving exercise follows. Once upon a time, most of the material that made all of our solar system was gathered from a cloud of gas and dust by gravitational effects, to form our sun and its extensive system of planets, asteroids, comets, fragments […]

Light Becomes Solid

At the moment of writing, the NASA New Horizons probe is approaching Pluto for its flyby and data gathering mission. It is an extraordinary feat of engineering to navigate a small craft – about the size of a baby grand piano –  3 billion miles across the solar system to within 8 thousand miles of Pluto’s surface. […]